The Elementary School Teacher Who Said Stephen Miller Ate Glue Is an American Hero

Earlier this week, the Hollywood Reporter published a charming conversation with one Nikki Fiske, a 72-year-old elementary school teacher who had the distinct privilege of having White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller in her third-grade class some two and a half decades ago. She recalled that eight-year-old Miller—a man who would later attempt to prove the inherent superiority of his gender by crashing a girls' track meet—briefly harbored a fondness for eating dried glue off his arm. This is not the most consequential political news story of the week, but considering the very real power Miller wields as a government official of consequence, it is the most entertaining.

Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk—he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue—we didn't have glue sticks in those days—and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.

Today, the Los Angeles Timesreports that Fiske's employer, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, has elected to place her on "home assignment" pending the completion of some sort of internal inquiry. A district spokesperson told the Times that its concerns relate to "her release of student information," and that her participation in the interview "may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies."

As a general rule, safeguarding the academic records of elementary-aged children from public disclosure is an important and eminently reasonable policy. We grow out of the various phases of our youths, and as adults, we should not have to go through the rest of our lives knowing that details about, say, the precise orifices into which we once deposited our boogers are readily accessible to anyone equipped with a smartphone. It is perfectly okay to have quirks! (If nothing else, learning that they once existed reminds us that Miller is, in fact, a human.)

Like all rules, however, this one is not perfect. And when someone breaks it with respect to a repulsive xenophobe who has been empowered to implement his wildest white nationalist fantasies on behalf of a president defined by his bigotry and a political party that has embraced him for it, such an act needn't be treated as one of unforgivable malevolence. This time around, I implore Nikki Fiske's superiors to pardon for her transgression, and to return her to the classroom posthaste, where, God willing, she will not have a student who facilitates a family separation policy or implements a Muslim ban ever again.